If bricks and mortar can heal, the dedication of a building in Waterloo this month could end one of the great personal quarrels in the history of science. The Franklin-Wilkins building of King's College London, to be opened by the Princess Royal on 22 March, will couple the names of two pivotal scientific figures who were bitter enemies during the two years they worked together: Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins Kings' intention is obviously to remind the world how much it contributed, through their work, to the discovery of the double helix of DNA in the spring of 1953. But irony will hang heavy over the occasion. King's was scooped to the discovery by James Watson and Francis Crick at the rival Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. And the celebratory address will be given by Watson and Wilkins, the men most responsible for casting Franklin as the 'dark lady' of DNA.

The event will also be overshadowed by the college's own unease over Franklin's unhappy experience there. 'No longer the "forgotten scientist" of the DNA story', the King's alumni magazine proclaimed this autumn, with a picture of Franklin on the cover. Inside, it rehearsed the facts: Wilkins won the Nobel Prize in 1962 with Watson and Crick. Franklin died before the prize was awarded. (Nobel Prizes are never given posthumously.)

The college now knows the part it played in creating the tension between Wilkins and Franklin. In 1950, the head of its biophysics unit, Professor John T. Randall, invited Franklin, working in Paris where she had acquired a fine reputation in X-ray crystallography, to apply her skills at King's. After she accepted, he changed his mind about what she should work on and directed her to working on fibres of DNA. She would have the project to herself, he told her, apart from a research student, Raymond Gosling, and an American temporary assistant. He did not tell her that Wilkins had already done formidable work on DNA and intended to continue. Wilkins was away at the time and never knew the terms of appoint ment. He believed Franklin was coming to join his team.

The stage - the dingy basement laboratories beneath King's College in the Strand - was thus set for trouble, even before the clash of temperaments that became apparent once Franklin heard Wilkins daring to voice his opinions on her results. On the one side was a quick, single-minded young woman with a passion for argument; on the other an exceedingly reserved man with a hesitant, circumlocutory manner and an aversion to direct eye contact.

Wilkins was aware that in Cambridge Watson and Crick at the Cavendish were barging in on King's territory by working on DNA, but intermittently and through using the entirely different route of model-building rather than taking X-ray photographs. On many visits to Cambridge he spoke freely to them of his troubles with Franklin who, he felt, had virtually shut him out of his own subject.

Franklin, on arriving at King's, realised she had made a terrible mistake. She loathed what she felt was the cold atmosphere of King's, where women were not allowed in the senior common room. As soon as she could organise the transfer of her Turner-Newall fellowship to another University of London college, Birkbeck, she announced she was leaving. Wilkins was delighted. Franklin, he felt, had been given the best cameras and DNA samples to work with, only to try to keep her results to herself rather than sharing them in the spirit of scientific collegiality.

As 1953 opened, Franklin wrote to a friend that she was leaving much work undone in order to get out of King's as soon as possible. At the end of January, when Watson visited King's, Wilkins showed him the best of her photographs. Numbered 51, it showed the B-form of DNA, with a stark, black cross of reflections. One look told Watson, a brash and ambitious 25-year-old from the American Midwest, that he and Crick were on the right track.

He returned to Cambridge and, with Crick, started to construct a model with double coils of paired atoms. Knowing that further experimental data from the work of Franklin and others at King's was in a report circulated among members of the biophysics committee of the Medical Research Council, source of the money for Randall's research unit, they asked Max Perutz, a Cavendish colleague, to let them see it. He obliged. On 7 March, a happy Wilkins wrote to Crick: 'I think you will be interested to know that our dark lady leaves us next week ... at last the decks are clear and we can put all hands to the pumps! It won't be long now. M.'

But it was too late. By the time Wilkins's letter reached Cambridge, the pair whose names will be forever linked had completed their model and were drafting for the scientific journal Nature the now-celebrated letter announcing in effect that they had discovered the secret of life. Published on 25 April 1953, it ended with the famous understatement: 'It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.'

It did escape Franklin's notice, however, that before completing their model, Watson had had the advantage of seeing her stunning Photograph 51 and of reading her precise calculations on the molecule's dimensions.

News that the Cavendish had scooped them caused much consternation at King's. There was some feeling that Wilkins had gone up to Cambridge too often, talked too freely, been milked for data by the clever Cavendish pair and given away what belonged to the home team. What has never been disputed are the brilliant perceptions - how the chains were linked by complementary pairs of base pairs and how they ran in opposite directions - that vaulted Watson and Crick to the summit.

Through some complicated old-boy networking between Randall, Sir Lawrence Bragg at the Cavendish and the editor of Nature , King's was allowed to announce its own progress on DNA in the same issue. There were to be, appropriately enough, considering the circumstances, two separate papers from King's: one from Wilkins and his colleagues, A.R. Stokes and H.R. Wilson, a second by Franklin and Gosling. This enabled her to put Photograph 51 into print at last.

A week before these publications, Franklin, now happily at Birkbeck, received more unpleasantness from King's. Randall wrote to say that she was to stop working, even to stop thinking, about 'the nucleic acid problem'. Furthermore, she was to cease supervising Gosling on his thesis. The reorganisation made necessary by her departure could not proceed 'while you remain, in an intellectual sense, a member of the laboratory'.

Franklin laughed off the dictatorial letter, saying: 'Just the sort of thing they do there [ie, at King's].' She and the young, genial Gosling, who were jointly working on several unfinished publications, had great fun meeting as if subversives. Moreover, she reasoned that she could hardly stop thinking about the nucleic acids, for a form was present in the tobacco mosaic virus, the subject of her new research. (She was to achieve impressive results on TMV before her death.)

Franklin's first step toward wider public recognition came only in 1968, and to many it was a backward step. The mythologising of Rosalind Franklin, and probably of DNA itself, began with the publication of The Double Helix , Watson's brilliant, entertaining, tactless bestseller. In it 'Rosy' Franklin appears as the villainess, the archetypal bluestocking, a harpy who might have been pretty if she had only bothered to take off her glasses and do something interesting with her hair.

'Clearly,' wrote Watson about Wilkins's dilemma, 'Rosy had to go or be put in her place _ unfortunately, Maurice could not see any decent way to give Rosy the boot.'

Chauvinist words like these were sufficient to launch the legend of Franklin, the wronged heroine. Since then the myth has grown and, abetted by the fact of her tragic early death from ovarian cancer at the age of 37, shows no signs of fading. Franklin has become a feminist icon, the Sylvia Plath of molecular biology, a genius whose gifts were sacrificed to the greater glory of the male. Her failure to win the Nobel Prize has been seen as the prime example of the entrenched misogyny of the science establishment, rather than the consequence of the Nobel policy against posthumous awards.

One aggrieved American neuroscientist, Candace Pert, blamed anti-female prejudice when she was passed over for an award she felt she deserved. It was just what had happened to Franklin, she argued. In her 1997 book, Molecules of Emotion , Pert goes so far as to suggest that Franklin's cancer 'had been exacerbated by the humiliation she suffered at the hands of these, and probably many other, old boys'.

A more substantial boost to Franklin's posthumous reputation was given by Sir Aaron Klug, now president of the Royal Society, who was Franklin's closest collaborator at Birk- beck. From studying her DNA lab books he has revealed that in March 1953 she was far closer to solving the structure of DNA than her contemporaries realised. Moreover, he spelled out her crucial contributions: establishing DNA's existence in two forms, A and B; working out the position of the phosphorous atoms in the molecule's backbone and, critically, taking the clearest photographs of its internal structure.

To him, her weakness was isolation: 'She needed a collaborator and she didn't have one - somebody to break the pattern of her thinking, to show what was right in front of her, to push her up and over.'

Signs of belated recognition proliferate. Franklin was accorded a highly sympathetic portrayal in the BBC Horizon programme's 1987 dramatisation, Life Story . The National Portrait Gallery placed her photograph beside that of Wilkins and beneath those of Watson and Crick in its science room. Her Cambridge college, Newnham, dedicated a graduate building to her. Her London school, St Paul's Girls', now has a Rosalind Franklin design technology engineering workshop.

Perhaps it is now Wilkins whose image needs burnishing. Outside of King's, where he is revered, he has suffered unfairly from his caricature in what he calls 'Jim's novel'. Over the years, he has been hounded by the charge that he holds a prize that rightfully belongs to someone else and that he was wrong to show Franklin's photograph to Watson. In fact, he held the photograph quite properly, as Franklin was turning over to him her materials preparatory to leaving King's. More hurtful has been being accused of being anti-female, which his colleagues and students know he is not. He has even suggested that the more fitting name for the new building would be the Hanson-Franklin-Wilkins building, in honour also of Dr Jean Hanson, his distinguished colleague at King's for many years.

Easily glossed over in the much-retold story is the substantial work that had already been done there on DNA fibres before Franklin's arrival. Because of it, she was able to pick up a new subject and race ahead with it. The college's pioneering work may be more appreciated when the full record of the events leading to the discovery can be read. Such an archive for the history of molecular biology is now being assembled by the Norman Publishing Company in San Francisco. Its representative, who will be on hand at the King's proceedings on 22 March, is Al Seckel, a cognitive neuroscientist from the California Institute of Technology. Seckel has already acquired papers, correspon dence and lab notebooks of many eminent scientists, including Franklin, Crick, Klug, Gosling and Max Perutz, and is keen for more.

The dedication of the Franklin-Wilkins building will bring together all the surviving principals of the race for DNA, except for Crick, who will appear on video from his home in California. There is, however, apprehension about what Watson will say. Now president of the Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory on Long Island and former director of the US human genome project, he is not only a candid author but an unpredictable speaker, with a penchant for making headlines with unguarded remarks. At the launch in September of the Harvard Center for Genomics Research, he opened his inaugural address before an overflow crowd of 1,000 students and faculty with a ingenuous denial of guilt: 'There's a myth which is that, you know, that Francis and I basically stole the structure from the people at King's. I was shown Rosalind Franklin's X-ray photograph and "Whooo! That was a helix!", and a month later, we had the structure; and [that] Wilkins should never have shown me the thing. I didn't go into the drawer and steal it. It was shown to me, and I was told the dimensions, a repeat of 34 angstroms, so, you know, I knew roughly what it meant and it was that the Franklin photograph was the key event _ psychologically, it mobilised us back into action.

'The truth is that we should have got the structure in the fall of '51. There was enough data. We wouldn't have been able to say with finality that it was right because, uh, that came with Rosalind's X-ray work, that was the proof it was right _ first slide. Oh, there _'

And up on the screen went Franklin's Photograph 51.

But why, we outsiders may ask, this intense surge of fascination for the personalities and lab politics of 1953? The answer, of course, is the growing popular awareness of the importance of DNA. This three-letter abbreviation for deoxyribonucleic acid, the molecule that lies in every gene, has entered the common vocabulary. It is in the tabloids every day. GM food, genetic engineering and all the rest are the consequence of the discovery that has edged out Einstein's relativity theory as the greatest of the twentieth century.

The names of Watson and Crick have joined Darwin and Copernicus among the immortals. If the names of Franklin and Wilkins are not among them, they at least will share a building on the South Bank of the Thames.

 Brenda Maddox is writing the biography of Rosalind Franklin for HarperCollins.